British-Irish boy band, One Direction, who recently won 3 awards at the 42nd American Music Award has broken a record of becoming the only group to score four consecutive No. 1 debuts on the U.S. Billboard 200 album chart on Wednesday, ousting Taylor Swift from her chart-topping reign.
Four is One Direction’s fourth No. 1 album in a row, in less than three years. They previously topped the list with their debut effort, Up All Night (on the list dated March 31, 2012), Take Me Home (Dec. 1, 2012) and Midnight Memories.
The band also made history on music streaming platform Spotify by scoring the most first-week streams after “Four” was streamed 11.6 million times in the United States and 30 million times worldwide. The news comes after Swift made a highly publicized move to take her music catalog off the popular service.
Swift’s “1989” dropped to No. 2 this week with 214,000 sales. The album became the biggest debut of the year after opening with 1.3 million copies, and held the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart for three consecutive weeks.
“1989” has sold more than 2.2 million copies, the second-biggest selling album of 2014, behind only Disney’s “Frozen” soundtrack with 3.6 million copies.
In the history of the Billboard 200 chart, only three groups have reached No. 1 with their first four studio albums: One Direction, The Monkees (between 1966-1967) and The Kingston Trio (with their first five sets, 1958-1960).
While all four of One Direction’s albums debuted at No. 1, The Monkees and The Kingston Trio’s releases climbed to No. 1 after entering the chart at a lower rank. (The chart didn’t see its first debut at No. 1 until 1975, when Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy started atop the list.